Articles

This week a music retailer in Britain – HMV – laid off a huge swath of workers… including a woman named Poppy Cleere, who started as an intern at HMV more than two years ago. While an intern, HMV made her responsible for all of their social media accounts, and as she sat in the […]

Much of our skepticism about buying a new product or service is a self-defense mechanism. We don’t want to be scammed. We don’t want to be taken advantage of. We are basically telling a stranger, “I can’t do this. I need help.” and we want to know that they aren’t going to stick a sword […]

I had an employee in my Elevator Pitch workshop last week! Not MY employee… an employee of a company! Since I usually work with business owners, solopreneurs, and other principals, having an employee in one of my workshops is refreshing. It helps us remember: You are not your company.

A friend of mine asked me an interesting question today: Lately I notice that many organizational planners/hr reps and business professionals often make the mistake of believing that marketing and graphic design are synonymous. Do you find this also? In fact, I do. The understanding of the Communications Continuum, as I call it, seems to […]

When we build our web sites, when we craft our messages, when we set our pricing structures, we look at other people who do something similar to what we do. Gotta measure up the competition, right? So, after seeing how they have answered those questions, we make adjustments, and then publish our version of the […]

When you are the product being sold, and your actions and interactions are being analyzed for marketable patterns, what is your responsibility? Can you play a conscious role in your productization? Are you powerless or powerful?

I wrote an article called “Thoughtful Conversation Welcomed” in which I laid out the case for disabling Comments on your blog. My reasoning hinged around the fact that Links are more valuable (in Google-juice) than Comments. Authoritative inbound links are more interesting to Google than comments, so why not share links instead of comments?